The present invention generally relates to manufacturing, remanufacturing or repairing replaceable imaging components, and more particularly to apparatus and techniques for replacing an electronic circuit.
In the imaging industry, there is a growing market for the remanufacture and refurbishing of various types of replaceable imaging cartridges such as toner cartridges, drum cartridges, inkjet cartridges, and the like. These imaging cartridges are used in imaging devices such as laser printers, xerographic copiers, inkjet printers, facsimile machines and the like, for example. Imaging cartridges, once spent, are unusable for their originally intended purpose. Without a refurbishing process these cartridges would simply be discarded, even though the cartridge itself may still have potential life. As a result, techniques have been developed specifically to address this issue. These processes may entail, for example, the disassembly of the various structures of the cartridge, replacing toner or ink, cleaning, adjusting or replacing any worn components and reassembling the imaging cartridge.
Some toner cartridges may include a chip having a memory device which is used to store data related to the cartridge or the imaging device, such as a printer, for example. The imaging device may communicate with the chip using a direct contact method or a broadcast technique utilizing radio frequency (RF) communication. This chip is typically mounted in a location, such as a slot on the cartridge to allow for proper communication between the printer and the toner cartridge when the cartridge is installed in the printer. When the toner cartridge is being remanufactured, as described above, the chip provided by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), such as Hewlett-Packard or Lexmark, may need to be replaced by a compatible chip developed by a third party. Due to the design of the toner cartridge, a certain part of the cartridge which helps hold the chip in place may need to be permanently removed in order to remove the OEM chip. With the part of the toner cartridge removed, a replacement chip would not be secured to the cartridge when it is installed. Thus, it would be desirable to provide techniques for attaching a replacement chip to such a toner cartridge.